Process – Leon and Mathilda

So a little bit ago, I upgraded from my teeny Bamboo tablet to a Wacom Bamboo Connect pen and tablet, a trade for a drawing. The gent that traded me the tablet wanted fan-art for “Leon the Professional”. A challenge, to be sure!

First of all, I’ve never been great at likeness. I’ve since been practicing a lot with it, but it’s still a big challenge. Second of all, I wasn’t sure what I could bring to this piece. I wanted to come up with something cool and moody, but this is kind of out of my element. I played around with different sketches until I realized I wanted to capture this scene:

At this point, I thought this was a decent composition so this is what I went with.

Stripes are hard. So are children heads.

I was actually happy with how he turned out. Jean Reno has so much character in his face, he was easier to draw than 12 year old Natalie Portman.

Adding definition, and trying to capture Natalie Portman.

Scene coming together

Fixed Mathilda’s head and posing.

Final piece, after details defined, colour correction, and materials overlayed for a grungier look.

I loved working on this, and I took my time at it, because I wanted to be able to sit back every so often and try to stay objective. I know I could improve on posing, and the the overall composition with it, these are lessons for other pieces down the line.

Artwork and personal blog of Mela Pagayonan, a human from Toronto who enjoys using sophisticated computer software to create digital images that sometimes imitates real life, fantastical settings or other things. Mela is also bad at writing profiles.